before and addressed himself at once to the task of understanding
the people and the circumstances in which they lived.

On this particular afternoon he was occupied with his agent, going
systematically through the details of the management of the estate.

It was indeed a discouraging prospect. Such a condition of pauperism
seemed incredible in a village within a few hours of his own
England. Except for a few moderately thriving tradesmen, the whole
population seemed to live from hand to mouth. The entire village was
in debt. They owed the landlords, the tradesmen, they even owed each
other money and goods. It seemed to be a community cut off from the
rest of the world, in which nothing from the outside ever entered.
No money was ever put into the village. On the contrary there was a
continuous withdrawal. By present standards a day would come when
the last coin would depart and the favoured spot would be as
independent of money as many of the poorer people were of clothing.

It came as a shock to Nathaniel Kingsnorth. For the first time it
began to dawn on him that, after all, the agitators might really
have some cause to agitate: that their attitude was not one of
merely fighting for the sake of the fight. Yet a lingering
suspicion, borne of his early training, and his father's doctrines
about Ireland, that Pat was really a scheming, dishonest fellow,
obtruded itself on his mind, even as he became more than half
convinced of the little village's desperate plight.

Nathaniel loathed injustice. As the magistrate of his county he
punished dishonesty. Was the condition he saw due to English
injustice or Irish dishonesty? That was the problem that he was